1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to the retrieval of computer resources.
2. State of the Art
In the space of just a few years, the Internet has gone from being a buzzword to being an indispensable part of the way people work. Information is located on the Internet using Uniform Resource Locators, or URLs. The most familiar type of URL is the Web page address, e.g., www.company.com. Many other types of URLs may also used, for example, network locations, FTP locations, news locations, e-mail addresses, file locations, network zones, etc. As the Internet has progressed from being a curiosity to being a heavily-used tool, a need has arisen for organizing URLs in such a way as to facilitate repeated access of an Internet resource. The most familiar way of organizing URLs is to simply ad URLs to a xe2x80x9cfavorites list,xe2x80x9d organized alphabetically. When an Internet resource is accessed and displayed under control of a Web browser, the user may select a command to add the URL of the resource to a menu-style favorites list. The URL itself may be displayed within the list, or a natural-language description of the resource may be displayed. To access the same resource again at a later time, the user may simply select the appropriate entry within the list.
Although a favorites list is very useful, it is a simple, fixed organizational scheme that can only become increasingly cumbersome with increased use. An alternative approach to organizing URLs is described in U.S. Pat. No. 5,737,560, incorporated herein by reference. This patent describes a xe2x80x9cWeb Jumperxe2x80x9d software tool that may be used to create xe2x80x9cjumpsites.xe2x80x9d A jumpsite is an iconographic representation of a URL. Doubling clicking on a jumpsite causes a Web browser to be activated to retrieve the resource specified by the URL. An options button allows a user to set a default Web browser and a default directory in which a jumpsite is stored. This solution, while providing a great improvement over conventional favorites lists, leave considerable room for improvement. In particular, because URLs are machine-intelligible but not necessarily machine intelligible, user interaction with URLs should not only avoid typing of URLs but should also be xe2x80x9cforgivingxe2x80x9d when a URL is incompletely specified. Furthermore, because the Internet is still rapidly evolving, flexibility should be preserved to use URLs in many different ways with potentially many different programs. What is needed, then, is a flexible user-driven method of creating and organizing URLs on a user machine.
The present invention, generally speaking, provides a flexible, user-driven method of creating and organizing URLs on a user machine. In one embodiment of the invention, Internet location objects are created and displayed as icons in a graphical user interface (GUI) environment. Internet location objects may be manipulated by the user in similar fashion as other GUI objects, e.g., files, folders, aliases, etc. The full organizational power of a hierarchical GUI file system is therefore brought to bear on the problem of organizing URLs. Internet location objects may be created through xe2x80x9cdrag-and-dropxe2x80x9d manipulation of text. When an object is dragged from within an application into a system window, a drag object describing what is being dragged in passed from the application to the operating system. An application may be aware of Internet location objects and, when an object is dragged from within the application into the system window, may specify that the object being dragged is a URL. Alternatively, the application may be unaware of or not support Internet locations but support generic text drag-and-drop, in which case the application, instead of specifying a xe2x80x9cURL drag flavor,xe2x80x9d specifies a xe2x80x9ctext drag flavorxe2x80x9d as part of the drag object. Depending on the drag flavor, the file manager either causes an Internet location object (URL drag flavor) to be created directly or intelligently parses a text string that has been dragged and dropped onto the user desktop to determine is the text string is likely a URL (text drag flavor). If a text string specified as part of a text flavor drag object is found to likely be a URL, then an Internet location object is created. Otherwise, a different behavior is followed, e.g., a xe2x80x9cclippingxe2x80x9d object or other object may be created. Preferably, an icon used to represent an Internet location object is suggestive of the function of the Internet location object and is distinctively different from an icon used to represent a clipping object. When the user xe2x80x9copensxe2x80x9d an Internet location object, a browser or other assigned program is launched and retrieves the resource identified by the URL stored as part of the Internet location object. The resource may be located remotely or may be located on the local user machine. In particular, a URL can refer to resources that are not xe2x80x9con the netxe2x80x9d (and which do not represent cached net resources). For example, URLs can be used to refer to files or directories on hard drives attached to a user machine independently of whether the machine is or has ever been attached to a network. URLs can thus serve a function very similar to aliases.